5 Comments

I can't wait to see this word used in the field more often. Your brain is amazing, I would love to plug electrodes on your head some day.

Expand full comment

I like it. Thanks for sharing your mind. As a lateral thinker, I'm now wondering about the interplay between societal or cultural cybiosis and collective applications, negative externalities, cognitive autonomy and rights and the list goes on.

It's a deep rabbit hole 😅.

What are your thoughts on this?

Expand full comment

Hey Faizan, thank you for reading and continuing the conversation!

That is an incredibly cool way to extend the concept - here the concept of usefulness becomes even more treacherous as a defining factor.

Eg I think of the Social Dilemma doc about Facebook, and the way that social media interacts with society, and impact this integration has had on us collectively and individually.

Something like Instagram would have high cybiosis in terms of the usability and scalability, but is a bit of a minefield when you think of pros and cons.

Substack alternatively may not be as addictive but ideally has less of the negatives- it would be an interesting discussion to try and compare where the two should go.

I think there may not be a definitive answer for the cybiosis of a lot of systems we interact with, as any rating scale would require some subjective input, but even trying to rank them quickly focusses the conversation on the problem areas.

How would you approach balancing the pros and cons when thinking about the usability of tech? Eg where would you rank Instagram vs Substack?

Expand full comment

Thank you for the detailed response and expanding the nuances further. Umm, the heatwave is making my brain's rpm low but here are my thoughts😂

Usually such conversations require an in person talk, as mostly contexts can be misconstrued over the text

Your comparisons are very spot on and linking impact vs integrations on the matrix

Regarding your question in the end, I stopped using instagram ages ago!! Because of the cognitive hijacking and its real life implications on my life. So that's why prefer Substack.

For pros and cons i would consider the factors of time value, collective wisdom/dumbness, our agencies as a species, content quality and societal impacts.

Do you know about any initiatives/non profits working for a multi-dimensional model of cybiosis?

Expand full comment

I guess that's the best example then of where it should be on the spectrum- substack is higher as it is more positive / useful for you!

definitely i think that this kind of topic is better to discuss in person- it's a bit widespread to condense solely into messages! Maybe I'll try to organise a discussion on this topic if anyone's interested... could be fun!

i don't know of any initiatives / non-profits working on this, I'm sure there are quite a few segmented orgs though eg working on how social media impacts us! but would be fascinating to try and build it out further

Expand full comment